Rereading Radical Texts: Coonardoo and the Politics of Fiction

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo and Rachel de Queiroz’s The Year Fifteen: a settler colonial reading

“…he Austlit database displays more than 880 entries of critical texts on Katharine Susannah Prichard. 4 Examining some of those texts pertaining to Coonardoo, it is possible to notice that various of the assertions about the novel can be counteracted with diametrically opposed argumentation, either by a single critic or by diferent ones: the novel -or parts of it -is censured and praised; its degree of verisimilitude can be played up or down; it is viewed alternately as subjective or as objective, realist or romantic, reticent or bold in its assertions; it is considered strongly and consistently committed to an ideology or loosely and mistakenly so; in the cultural studies realm it can be placed at the cutting edge, supporting Indigenous and/or feminist causes, or it would be reactionary, actually doing a disservice to the minorities it is supposed to represent (for some of these readings see Bird, 2003;Corbould, 1999;Hodge, 1991;Kossew, 2004;Leane, 2014;Lever, 2000). his dissonance might be rooted in the fact that Prichard is a non-Indigenous woman trying to tell a story from the perspective of an Indigenous one (her entitlement to do so is also a matter of contention).…”